A little about Haunted Hammond

Please enjoy this new song as much as I do. You see, I chose to skip the opening of an art gallery so that I could finish recording it. (Sorry Ignatius!) My brother and I found this 70's style Hammond organ at a strange Christian charity shop in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It had been marked down, price slashed, and discounted about three or four times from the original sticker price of 300 to about 60 dollars. Naturally, we snatched it up, and it has COMPLETELY changed the way I write and compose music. So I guess you could say it has been haunting my creative process. More of a haunting Hammond than a haunted Hammond. (However, it does get an ill temper if you don't treat it with love, which is kind of creepy.) All the same, everyone who has played it so far agrees that it's a really cool thing to have around. Of course I just had to write a song about it.

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Big Ups To My Little Brother

I have to thank my brother and housemate, Sean Duffy, for adding a shitload of talent to my recordings. He has a lot of good musical taste, too (mostly jazz and vintage funk) so I feel like this higher level of musicianship might be helping to push my songwriting envelope.

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Write, write, write, but no record

Has it reached the point where I'm too lazy to haul out the microphones? Right now I have at least three songs written that just need to be recorded. (Including one about Chloe Sevigny!) I can hear them in my head. I can play their parts aloud. But when it comes time to actually commit them on tape, I become shy. This, though a curious problem to have, is a direct departure from my earlier recording career, when I would write any old crap just to have SOMETHING to record. Hopefully by writing this blog entry, I will spark some sort of interest the next time I have the leisure to be reading my own blog entries. And in that case, note to self: FUCKING RECORD SOME SONGS!

Signed,
Ryan

P.S. I also have a problem thinking of which songs to replace with the new songs I will eventually record. Perhaps I should get another Myspace.

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Recording Tips

Room sound. Lately I've been on this kick where I use maximum room sound for things, and then fill in the sonic holes with reverb. Both the original sound and the echo get a treatment, so the resulting sound is lovely, I think. Then again, I record nearly everything in the bi-directional polar pattern. Heavy compression with a high gain setting also helps bring out the natural room sound.

Flipping the phase on one channel of a stereo track with a mono source. This is a good little trick for preventing a track from taking up too much 'space' in the mix. When used with propper panning, you can give a mono source a stereo feel. But you have to be careful you don't muddy it up in the process.

Compressed drum samples. If you compress the hell out of drum sounds, you can create different nuanced rhythms between the peaks of bass drum and snare hits. This works well for musicians like me who have no regular access to drum kit recording.

Running bass direct input through a tube preamp. Sometimes I'll mess around with this little trick when I need some high gain, slightly fuzzy, warm tone. Or when I don't want to piss off my neighbours with a loud bass amp during quiet hours.

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Lilo!

Never in my life could I imagine being more happy with a song about Linday Lohan.

It was about time.

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Song for September

I have succeeded in writing the saddest pop song ever!

Also, I have an addiction to these really bad 90s club beats.

Is that okay?

Ryan

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A new song I'm working on

I would like to thank Garageband's Motown Drums sample 19 for helping me realise my dream of writng post-modern Stevie Wonder hits.

I would also like to thank my new microphone for rocking the stereo vocals.

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PLUS DRUMS!

My friend Alex and I took to the suburbs to record some drum tracks. So that means all the songs (even the demos) have been updated with new tracks. Awesome.

Once my new microphone arrives, I can finally fix the (3 AM recording session in my apartment) vocals, and finalize the mixes.

How professional. If only I could figure out how to circumvent MySpace audio file compression of doom.

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Holla

Fun times on the internet.

Listen to some of my songs.

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